'Who will give us back these 12 years?, ask Surat blast

For the accused in 1993 Surat blasts case and their families, acquittal doesn't undo the pa in, the hurt, and the years in jail.

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UDAY MAHURKAR

July 25, 2014

ISSUE DATE: August 4, 2014

UPDATED: August 1, 2014 08:13 IST

Abid Wadiwala, 39 Son of Iqbal Wadiwala, jailed in the blasts case

Pain and regret mark the face of Mohammed Surti, 78, Gujarat minister for ports in the 1980s, as he narrates the bitter saga of his persecution. Sitting before a portrait of the Mecca pilgrimage in his two-storey house, Surti-once a Congress stalwart- was one of the 11 men who were sentenced to jail by a TADA court in 2008 for allegedly masterminding two bomb blasts in Surat in 1993 in the riots following the Babri Masjid demolition. They were charged for the crime in 1995. On July 18, after a 19-year ordeal, all accused were acquitted by the Supreme Court after remaining in jail for 12 years.

Even as he is relieved at his name being cleared, some disturbing questions nag Surti: "Who will give us back these 12 years? Who will compensate us for the demonisation we and our families went through for two decades when we were branded terrorists? Can't the system at least ensure that such serious cases do not drag on for years?

The story of the two bomb blasts, the conviction of the accused and their delayed acquittal is discomfiting. The die was cast in 1993 when a bomb went off in the Varachha Road area on the morning of January 28. An eight-yearold schoolgirl died and 11 people were injured. Another blast at the Surat railway station, on the morning of April 22, injured 38 people. The blasts had followed the post-Babri Masjid demolition riots in Mumbai and Surat that saw nearly 200 Muslims being massacred by rioters in the city's Varachha Road and Ved Road areas. The riots left the Muslims in the area more anxious than ever before.

In the Varachha Road blast case, the police arrested 27 people within a few days of the incident but all of them were acquitted two years later by the TADA court for want of evidence. The police then arrested 11 others the same year in connection with the railway station blast case and also charged them in the Varachha Road case. Significantly, none of the 11 accused was arrested from the scene of the two blasts which had taken place almost two years ago.

TADA provisions were applied to both cases as an afterthought and confessional statements were extracted from all 11 accused by the police, allegedly subjecting them to third-degree torture. The Supreme Court granted all the accused bail in 2001 but a Gujarat TADA court convicted them in 2008 to jail sentences ranging from 10 to 20 years. Before they were acquitted on July 18, each of them had thus served a minimum of 12 years in jail. Mustaaq Patel, 52, was the first to be arrested in the railway station blast case. "Why did the police take two years to arrest us when we were locals and not outsiders? Many of us were Congress leaders and workers and obviously the police was trying to please their new BJP bosses. Except me, all were arrested soon after Keshubhai Patel took oath as chief minister on March 14, 1995."

One of the acquitted persons contends that the police made them pay while the real culprits got away. "All those arrested by the police in the case were innocent and the police was unable to get the real culprits. The Varachha Road case against us was also totally false," he says. Another says that 90 per cent of the cases were false.

Says Hussein Ghadiali, 64, a businessman and a farmer, sitting with his grandchildren in his modest eighthstorey apartment in Surat, "Inhuman third-degree methods were used in order to make us confess. The soles of both my feet went black due to repeated beating with sticks. We had to confess under such circumstances." Mushtaq Shaikh, the defence lawyer for all the 11 acquitted, talks of how the case was politicised from day one: "The proceedings in any police case which has a bearing on national security and communal peace should be kept secret till definite conclusions emerge. Such a probe should be done with a feeling of national duty. But in this case, when the probe was on, the police would issue a press note every day inflaming communal passions." "The local vernacular dailies lapped up the false but juicy details of the case released by the police and we became victims of a media trial," says Surti. Patel was holidaying with his family on a beach near Surat when he was charged with the illegal possession of a revolver. This was on March 12, 1995, a day before the BJP government took over in Gandhinagar. A few days later, he was made an accused in the railway blast case. Surti and Ghadiali were the next to be arrested.

The police version of events runs thus: there was a heightened sense of insecurity among Muslims in the riots following the Babri Masjid demolition, including those that took place in Surat. The accused, therefore, decided to collect arms for self-protection and for taking revenge on the majority community. The police said that Iqbal Wadiwala, one of the accused, Ghadiali and his wife Shamima went to meet Surti when he was chairman of the Gujarat State Fisheries Development Board. There, say the police, they arranged to get six foreign-made grenades, two AK-47 rifles and 199 live cartridges from Abdul Latif in Ahmedabad and brought the arms to Surat. The grenades were used in the two blasts. According to the police, Surti came from Ahmedabad to Surat in his official car even as Wadiwala followed with the consignment in his Maruti van.

As a Congress worker and a smalltime land broker, Patel received a certificate for good conduct in jail. The jail superintendent noted his eagerness in organising religious celebrations for all inmates. When he was convicted by the TADA court in 2008, it weren't just his Muslim friends who cried in court. Says Mustaaq : "My son Minhaz, who is doing LLB now, was only two years old when I was arrested in 1995. Friends and relatives had to pitch in so that he could obtain his education. But more than my personal family agony, I felt hurt because of my sullied image in the eyes of my Hindu brethren. The only saving grace is that many among them knew all along that I was innocent."

Wadiwala, a Congress leader and member of the Surat Municipal Corporation Education Committee, saw his family's kerosene and hotel business completely destroyed during his two stints in jail before he, too, died of a liver ailment in 2013 while undergoing the sentence. His wife, Zubeda, and sons Abid, 39, and Wasim, 36, who run a small eatery near in Surat, are distraught. Says Abid: "My father died because he was not given proper treatment in jail." Surti's son Amin, 40, alleges that his fisheries business was deliberately destroyed by powerful players in the BJP government after his father's arrest in 1995. "We were treated like terrorists. People who came to meet us were questioned and even threatened," he says. The injustice wasn't merely the jail terms that the accused faced but the economic and social strangulation that their families outside suffered, year after year.